“Neurowipe is oriented in context” – Kommersant FM

Kommersant FM columnist Alexander Levy tells how the product has changed with the introduction of artificial intelligence.

Yandex has added a neuroswipe to its keyboard for mobile devices. It sounds like a disease or a banned substance, but in reality it is a method of continuous text input that uses neural networks. What makes it fast and convenient, the authors assure.

This is rather curious, since, for example, the GBoard keyboard, instead of the word “hello”, regularly suggests “baking tray” to me. And this is a fairly common feature. And the native keyboard of the smartphone replaced the expression “the best health” with the option “final health”.

Evaluate the novelty of “Yandex” is yet to be. Like any product based on or assisted by neural networks, it has a so-called pre-train phase, during which the model is trained on the database. The Yandex developers fed Neuroswipe 7 million real examples collected on an internal crowdsourcing platform.

After the launch, training, or rather, the improvement of the neural network will continue. Now thanks to live users, whose behavior will correct the results. As promised in Yandex, the introduced technology speeds up typing and reduces the number of typos and grammatical errors by 30% compared to the previous version of the swipe. How is this implemented?

To begin with, it is worth recalling what swipe text input is. A person does not click on individual letters, as if he were doing it on a physical keyboard, but swipes his finger over the virtual buttons without lifting it from the screen, connecting all the letters of the word in turn. Previously, what was hidden behind the resulting curved line was recognized by Yandex using special formulas created. Now these calculations have been taken over by neural networks.

Now the keyboard simultaneously reads the resulting line, selects the word variants corresponding to it, ranks them and determines the best one. In addition, neuroswipe is context oriented. It takes into account not only the words themselves that the user typed earlier, but also the theme of the application in which the work is in progress. Also, artificial intelligence monitors endings and cases.

According to Yandex, experienced users create messages with gestures 60% faster than when typing by letter. While neuroswipe works in Russian, but over time they promise support for other popular languages.